Over recent years, the use of LEDs in lighting systems has become increasingly widespread thanks to their numerous advantages over traditional incandescent, neon and halogen lamps.
Although the average price of LED light bulbs is higher than that of traditional light bulbs, their average life is decidedly longer, easily exceeding 50,000 hours.
Further, unlike incandescent light bulbs, which stop working all of a sudden when the filament breaks, the working life of an LED ends gradually, with appreciable but not excessive loss of light intensity, making it possible to plan substitution without running the risk of sudden complete loss of light.
The apparently inexorable spread of LED light bulbs is, however, almost certainly due to their energy efficiency: in effect, they are much more efficient than filament (or even halogen) light bulbs since much less energy is wasted in the form of infrared radiation and heat released to the environment compared to traditional light bulbs.
Manufacturers of light bulbs have therefore started producing LED light bulbs with standard connectors, making them suitable for installation in place of traditional light bulbs.
Owing to the constant growth of LED technology, however, industrial production is unable to keep up with new developments, not only on account of the investments required but also on account of the minimum required time for putting a new product into production.
In effect, the creation of new and increasingly higher performing LEDs renders the LED light bulbs present on the market rapidly obsolete.
Further, in terms of operating versatility, the LED bulbs currently available on the market do not allow easy management in electronic terms because they have only two electrodes corresponding to the positive and negative poles.
A further drawback of LED bulbs currently available on the market is due to their physical limitations to the capacity to dissipate heat. In effect, since LED bulbs are normally designed for medium wattage lighting, high wattage LEDs such as would, for example, be needed to light shop windows, cannot be mounted in such light bulbs because they would not be able to dissipate the heat they produce.
The above mentioned drawbacks in turn lead to a strongly felt problem in the field of lamp design, precisely because of the difficulty of predicting technical developments (not only in functional terms but also, and above all, in dimensional terms) of potentially usable LED bulbs. In other words, when designing a lamp or luminaire, it is extremely difficult, for example, to predict the size of a better performing or more powerful LED bulb which might appear on the market as little as one year after the lamp or luminaire has been put into production.